The Case Against Privacy

...This would undermine the whole principle of "voluntary compliance," the IRS alleges, and make its job that much more difficult...

...Three of four reported crimes against property go unsolved, as do about half of all rapes and aggravated assaults...

...But such defects aside, the bill is a serious attempt to come to grips with the difficult problems involved in enforcing our immigration laws—once they're agreed upon...

...The process is similar to a contempt of court citation...

...The gdvernment—and more precisely the rest of us— lost at least $80 billion as a result...

...Plains had too many ghosts for me...

...Though "privacy" is often preceded by the phrase "right to," the word is mentioned nowhere in the Constitution...

...An increasing number of gays feel comfortable living in the open...

...To detect and apprehend illegal aliens, the Immigration and Naturalization Service has traditionally relied on surprise raids on employers—a highly random, discriminatory tactic that far too often results in the detention of American citizens who can't prove their citizenship on the spot...

...Besides, why should taxpayers who make their money legitimately, and fully report it, have any qualms about occasionally being included in a computer program that matches their returns against a list of those on the food stamp rolls...

...followed by five gunshots...

...In this version of the small town, privacy is not an overwhelming concern...

...presidents—Lyndon Johnson comes particularly to mind—eager to listen over the backyard fence...

...Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it...

...The exclusionary rule's defects are further compounded by the fact that it makes absolutely no distinction between the police officer who makes an honest mistake in the heat of pursuing a suspect and one who commits an egregious violation of a citizen's rights...

...A respect for individualeccentricities is the hallmark of a democratic society...

...You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized ." The all-seeing telescreen, the hidden microphones, the ubiquitous Thought Police— it is a tribute to George Orwell's literary genius that his portrait of a world utterly lacking in privacy remains vivid even to those who know 1984 only by reputation...

...I loved my life in the Navy and the independence I had finally achieved...

...Making such distinctions is not always easy, of course...

...Citing a lack of resources and its concern for privacy, the Social Security Administration refused to classify the errors in any useful way...

...Offices, conference rooms, hotel rooms, and even bedrooms...

...Unfortunately, too often the government seems interested in doing just the opposite...

...District Court Judge George Leighton recently overturned the conviction of four terrorists accused of plotting to bomb several military installations...

...And it is the small town of Dixon, Illinois, idealized by Ronald Reagan, where neighbors care about one another and help in times of need, where "gossip" is sincere and well intentioned, where the ever-present concern for reputation prevents many a young man and woman from being led astray by temptation...

...But laws designed to protect the privacy of income tax records prohibit this collection strategy...

...one homosexual recently sued the Department of Defense for revoking his security clearance, arguing quite persuasively that he could hardly be subject to "blackmail" by foreign agents if he'd made no secret of his sexual preferences...

...This bill proposes a sweeping set of reforms of our current immigration laws, and many have rightly criticized it for being too restrictive, failing to fully appreciate how much new immigrants contribute to our economy...

...The average American intuitively understands a salient fact about the current tax system: so many people hedge and cheat, and get away with it, that those who decide to be completely honest are being played for suckers...

...In the past, this community "enforcement" has consisted of many devices: the prejudice meted out to unwed mothers, illegitimate children, and gays...

...What's more, it would no longer allow an employer to use the excuse of not wanting to risk the INS's meddlesome scrutiny...

...The IRS currently has just 13,500 revenue agents to conduct audits for 95 million returns, and last year they managed to get through just 1.5 percent of them, an all-time low...

...People who are illegal immigrants from Canada wouldn't be stopped...

...Not until 1965 did the Supreme Court, in Griswold vs...

...If anything, honest taxpayers should be keenly interested in having the government insure, as best it can, that their tax dollars are being wisely spent...

...For example, the Justice Department frequently would like to examine income tax returns to determine whether a suspected drug dealer reported enough income to justify, say, a Mercedes and 45-foot yacht— and how he claimed to have earned it...

...It does nothing of the sort...

...The reason...

...Such economy is poundfoolish and then some, given that every $1 million invested in additional auditors has, historically, returned about 20 times that in recovered revenues...

...The "right to privacy" has also been used to argue against all laws relating to the use and sale of heroin and other drugs, against laws that require the use of certain safety devices in automobiles, and against electronic scanning machines in supermarkets...

...U.S., ruled that the right to be secure from such searches—one's right to privacy, as it were—was so compelling that any evidence obtained by the government in an illegal search should not be admissible as evidence in court...

...The New York state legislature recently declared off-limits all records that "would affect the career and promotion of officers"--a definition that can be applied to virtually everything in an officer's file...

...The court ruled that Insurato's "reasonable expectation of privacy" had been violated and ruled the tape-recording inadmissible...

...So the judge granted bail, " the official recalls, "and the defendant promptly fled the country!' The rampant tax cheating that already exists puts the lie to the argument that existing laws about privacy must be preserved intact to protect "voluntary compliance...

...Does this encourage rampant misbehavior on the part of police officers eager to convict defendants...

...Neighbors, friends, and teachers—those in the best position to notice symptoms of child abuse—are too reluctant to interfere in what they see as a "family matter...

...While most recipients are honest, one hint of how many aren't was revealed recently in Pennsylvania when a computer "match" comparing food stamp recipients against wage data submitted by employers turned up 41,000 instances of discrepancies between income reported and the income actually earned...

...In a case that's now before the U.S...

...I cried...

...everyone knew each other's business...

...It's the four-time rapist who doesn't get caught after his fifth assault, or who, if he is caught, gets his case plea-bargained to aggravated assault and becomes eligible for parole after six months...

...The citizen whose home is ransacked at 3 a.m...

...Popular magazines and television sympathetically portray—some would say encourage—behavior that used to go by such pejorative' terms as "adultery!' Even in small towns the motel clerks are often indifferent as to who their guests are and what they do...

...When the Social Security Administration recently issued a form requiring disability applicants to grant access to their income tax records, a U.S...

...Hoover's venality was exemplified by the psychotic breakdown and eventual suicide of actress Jean Seberg after the FBI disseminated false rumors that one of her children (who was subsequently stillborn) had been fathered by a member of the Black Panthers...

...The government's capacity to correctly identify its citizens is so flimsy that the Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations recently estimated that fraudulent use of identification documents robs the government of up to $24 billion annually...

...As a result, police officers who stop an erratically driving motorist in, say, Connecticut usually have no way of finding out whether he's had his license previously revoked for drunken driving in three other states...

...Last year the IRS itself estimated that nearly half of all Americans cheated on their income taxes, and almost all of them got away with it...

...The image of Winston's constant struggle to hide his actions dominates not because his "privacy" is sacred but because in Oceania no individual actions are politically neutral...

...As a minor character chastises her neighbors in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (the setting is an urban apartment building, but the sentiment is distinctly smalltown): "You don't know the meaning of the word `neighbor...

...Shattuck listed several...

...Testifying before Congress, John Shattuck of the ACLU warned, "Any form of verification sufficiently reliable to support a fair system of employer sanctions . . . most certainly will pose a grave danger to civil rights and civil liberties ." What were some of the specific dangers...

...Indeed, Orwell's vision of the future was as flawed as the far happier one, replete with slick monorails and bubble-domed cities, advanced by his contemporary, Walt Disney...

...no other major country with similar constitutional protections against unreasonable searches and seizures has seen fit to embrace it...

...The party that really suffers is the public...

...Consider a few examples: —In Chicago, U.S...

...Shorter, for example, the conviction of an Ohio bank robber was overturned...

...Similar sentiments have been felt by millions of Americans, particularly in the post-World War II era, as they left the nation's farms and small towns for the big city...

...Springing the guilty The first area is that of search and seizure...

...It shows in the desire of many gays to live in the open, to transcend the need for privacy as it were...

...Mairi N Morrison provided research assistance for this article...

...Police departments, for example, routinely invoke an officer's "right to privacy" to prevent disclosure, even to confidential citizen review committees, of embarrassing information about an officer's misconduct...

...an appeals court has divided evenly on the issue...

...Ronald Reagan's "welfare queens" are far rarer than he and other conservatives like to suggest, but they do exist, as do those who cheat on unemployment, veterans' pensions, small business loans, and other programs...

...This is the small town of Zenith in Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt, or of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio...

...The card would eliminate the need for such raids...

...But the magistrate had required the FBI agent to swear his oath of truthfulness part way into the conversation rather than at the very beginning...

...Perhaps most important, an obsession with privacy is viewed as undermining the very bonds of community that knit the town's inhabitants together...

...Among them: Hitler's use of census data to identify Jews for shipment to extermination camps, our own use of census data to detain JapaneseAmericans during World War II, and South Africa's reliance on identity papers to police the movement of blacks under apartheid...

...See sidebar, page 20...

...Perhaps the best illustration of how unencumbered the average citizen feels is the respect shown the government agency that intrudes more into the personal affairs of the average citizen than any other: the Internal Revenue Service...

...are 'bugged' for the convenience of Government...

...Representative of these warnings is a recently published 1984 Calendar, which commemorates, day by day, over 1,000 various affronts on civil liberties in the last half-century...

...The wife gave the police her husband's guns, and a ballistics test revealed that one of them had fired the fatal bullet...

...First comes the card, then the central data bank, then the inevitable push for a national identity card used for a variety of other, and less benign, purposes...

...It is also the small town that Reagan alludes to occasionally, such as in his story of the local hotel owner who refused to give his football teammate a room for the night because he was black...

...if you're a zealous member of the Ku Klux Klan whom the government has good reason to suspect of terrorizing a black family, the same stricture should not apply...

...Orwell was himself something of a patriot, but he also understood that if a nation's leaders allowed themselves to "dislocate their sense of reality," as the militarists who rule Oceania do, then the state's power could grow intolerable...

...In a case before the U.S...

...The poor certainly deserve adequate benefits, which many do not now receive...

...In fact, the phrase "right to privacy" can be traced to an 1890 Harvard Law Review article by two young attorneys, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis...

...How can such brutality occur...

...The article also reflected the deep-seated, often unacknowledged conflict between privacy and the press...

...More than money is at stake...

...rather, it is to recognize the ambiguous status that privacy enjoys in American life...

...Our checks are regularly photographed, our credit histories bought and sold by private companies, our speeding automobiles tracked silently by radar, our wanderings in shopping malls watched by video cameras...

...Arnold Torres, executive director for the League of United Latin American Citizens, recently told Congress, "Throughout their history Americans have instinctively recoiled from the idea of a government identity document, recognizing that it is fundamentally inimical to democratic traditions...

...In the introduction to the calendar, Nat Hentoff of the Village Voice approvingly quotes the late William 0. Douglas of the Supreme Court: "We are rapidly entering the age of no privacy, where everyone is open to surveillance at all times, where there are no secrets from Government . . . . Secret observation booths in Government offices and closed television circuits in industry, extending even to the rest rooms, are common...

...Rather, the agency has steadfastly maintained that if citizens knew their tax returns would be made available to other agencies, far more of them would refuse to be truthful or even submit a return...

...Trimbull routinely tape-recorded important business conversations...

...against searches and seizures...

...So passionately is the exclusionary rule defended by its adherents that a large portion of the population mistakenly believes that the Constitution somehow mandates it...

...European welfare systems that allow such information-sharing, for example, are generally more advanced—and, most liberals would concede, more "humane"—than ours...

...The doctrine of in loco parentis is virtually dead on college campuses...

...Whether it's exhibited in teenagers who breathlessly collect autographs of rock stars, or in the more sophisticated version of dropping the names of famous people at cocktail parties, this phenomenon reflects an unspoken envy of those who've sacrificed some of their privacy for the seemingly more gratifying commodity of notoriety...

...Supreme Court mandated that state and local courts apply the rule as well...

...The specific information at issue in this case—which the accounting firm won in a lower court—is something called the tax accrual work paper, which reveals to what extent corporations are paying their legal share of taxes...

...It would help "prevent welfare fraud schemes, " and would have been useful in allowing the government to "locate Iranian students during the hostage crisis!' If the card were specially coded, those who'd defaulted on government loans "might be discouraged from trying to take out new loans before paying off the old ones...

...he had thousands of agents at his disposal to ferret out, and fabricate, damning information and he had a succession of U.S...

...moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard...

...the vicious gossip that often originates with the suspicious motel clerk or neighbor...

...And in another case— a 1973 drug raid in Collinsville, Illinois, in which federal and local narcotics agents ransacked the homes of two families by mistake—civil suits took more than six years to complete...

...Yet administrators of these programs have virtually no access to IRS records...

...Hoover, for example, in many respects resembled the small-town gossip, capable of destroying people's reputations with a few wellplaced whispers...

...Yet take a closer look at the widespread concern for privacy, and the assumptions underlying it, and two striking facts emerge...

...Mairi N. Morrison...

...But because of minor defects in the warrant, and because the attorney general was not acting as a wholly "neutral party, " the U.S...

...Such a system would be "useful in apprehending criminal fugitives" and an "invaluable asset" to the Parent Locator Service...

...Leighton ruled that while tape recorders and wiretaps were permissable, the videp cameras constituted an unconstitutional violation of the defendants' privacy...

...We should also not be sanguine about the potential of government to invade the privacy of its citizens...

...During the 1970s, Nixon's assault on privacy included using the IRS to harass political opponents, opening dissidents' mail, and burglarizing the files of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist...

...But asking them to sacrifice a modicum of privacy in exchange for receiving a substantial government benefit is a compromise that is inconsequential...

...But the real difference lies in what the information consists of, and what it's then used for...

...In all instances, the exclusionary rule requires the evidence to be thrown out...

...The search was ruled illegal...

...While they make it possible to record Winston's transgressions, they are clearly secondary...

...Bob Dylan left a small mining community in northern Minnesota, Andy Warhol a small steel town in Pennsylvania...

...But more important, the card would generally serve to reduce discrimination against those who appear foreign but who reside in the country legally...

...Perhaps the most maddening examples of this exaggerated concern for privacy involve the government invoking such protections to cover up the illegal or dubious activities of its own employees...

...several analogies, historical and otherwise, are commonly enlisted in the debate...

...In Oceania, there are no laws...

...And more to the point, it is to recognize that society, and the government agents responsible for its protection and well-being, has an interest in knowing certain information that individuals might even prefer to conceal...

...Connecticut, give constitutional imprimatur to "privacy...

...Neighbors no longer can listen in on regular phone conversations through party lines...

...When a disturbed young boy begins to spread unseemly stories, such displays suddenly take on a sinister cast...

...The privacy afforded by the big city gave them a chance to remake themselves—in a way, providing a modern version of the 19th century West...

...rules regulating students' personal behavior either don't exist or are widely ignored...

...But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to...

...This is also the small town of Thornton Wilder's Grover's Corners in Our Town, of River City in The Music Man, of Bedford Falls in It's a Wonderful Life...

...their bad reputations cannot be shed...

...But government has seldom been aggressive in enforcing such laws, relying instead on community standards to proscribe sexual behavior...

...The evidence is abundant, the examples both trivial and profound...

...Critics of such techniques as computer matching erroneously equate fair treatment for the poor with ensuring that they have the same privacy rights as those who ask nothing of the government...

...Court of Appeals, the FBI is refusing to release to NBC's Carl Stern the names of three high-ranking employees who were formally censured several years ago for misleading Justice Department and congressional investigators as to the extent of the Nixon administration's "black bag" jobs against political opponents...

...If you're a supporter of the nuclear freeze, the government should not be keeping a file on you, much less tapping your phone...

...The government had obtained a legal warrant to install electronic surveillance devices in a house frequented by the accused, and a video camera caught them in the act of making bombs...

...In the case of U.S...

...Neighbors like each other...

...the arrival of Orwell's fateful year has brought with it a noticeable increase in magazine articles, essays, and speeches that warn darkly of the parallels between Oceania and today's America...

...And, unfortunately, that's the way the American Civil Liberties Union would like to keep it...

...After two and a half years of being beaten and left by himself often for days at a time...

...After police discovered the body of a 14-year-old girl, her throat slit and a bullet in her head, they contacted the wife of a suspect whose car resembled one seen near the scene of the crime...

...they could also start a new life, trying to make amends for past mistakes...

...Indeed, if one defines privacy as the ability of individuals to escape the opprobrium of society and the punishment of government for behavior and thoughts that conflict with prevailing laws and standards, Americans today actually enjoy more "privacy" in their daily lives than ever before...

...Eight months later, Janice Kelley struck her son with an ax handle...

...In 1914 the Supreme Court, in Weeks vs...

...This latter version of small-town life has also shaped many contemporary views on the importance of protecting privacy from government abuses...

...Supreme Court ruled the search illegal and the evidence therefore inadmissible...

...But beefing up the IRS's enforcement staff is hardly a crusade that endears a congressman to his constituents, so little protest has been lodged...

...In one year, the amount of reported interest income leapt more than 25 percent...

...This spirit of government paranoia still lives...

...For the government's means-tested programs such as welfare and food stamps, tax returns are the best way to verify a recipient's eligibility for benefits as well as detect overpayments...

...The best way to dispel this feeling is a fair and efficient system that has a reasonable chance of apprehending those who cheat...

...For example, in the agency for for social services in Los Angeles, 600 social workers service to 69,000 children—one worker for every 100 children...

...Biddlebaum is forced to flee a lynch mob in the middle of the night, never to teach again...

...Yet these hints of 1984 are a far cry from the mass rallies, Big Brother posters, and pervasive sense of paranoia exhibited by the inhabitants of Oceania...

...In England, Canada, Germany, Israel, and many other countries, evidence can be admitted if it is authentic and relevant to the case, even if it's obtained in an illegal fashion...

...Perhaps most commonly, they could shed their lower-class origins and, their pasts unknown, acquire the tastes and mannerisms that would signal a more sophisticated background...

...The loneliness arises in part from the wish to have others notice things about your past or your character of which you are proud, and in part by the desire to have others care enough to know the more personal details of your life...

...For Winston, Orwell's protagonist, the most oppressive element of life in Oceania is not the pervasive presence of the telescreens or the Thought Police...

...While some might disagree with Hentoff and other civil libertarians about just how closely America resembles Orwell's Oceania, a remarkably broad consensus of liberals and conservatives share the assumption underlying these warnings: that privacy is a precious, inexorably eroding commodity to be vigilantly protected as the curiosity of government and the sophistication of surveillance technology steadily grows...

...Laws have long existed that prohibit extramarital sex, homosexuality, pornography, and, in some states, certain kinds of sexual activities among married people...

...Justice Hugo Black, who almost always voted with Douglas on civil liberties matters, ridiculed this notion in his dissent...

...there's no evidence to suppress...

...But secrecy laws on the books in most states now prevent social service agencies from sharing this information with the police...

...Most important is to recognize the long litany of privacy abuses that the government has committed in the past—and about which civil libertarians have been rightfully outraged...

...For example, several years ago the Department of Agriculture compared a list of 750,000 food stamp recipients in Illinois with Social Security Administration files and found discrepancies in 130,000 cases...

...The Fourth Amendment states simply that citizens have the "right to be secure...

...But I am nevertheless compelled to admit that government has a right to invade it unless prohibited by some specific constitutional provision ." Dixon vs...

...What characterizes much of the debate over privacy is how seldom they are made at all...

...Anonymity can mean freedom from the effects of prejudice...

...indeed, neighbors often don't even know one another...

...Proposals for a centralized data system are usually described with ominoussounding terms such as a "national population registry, " "cradle-to-grave dossiers, " and "internal passports...

...The apartment doorman who once scrutinized every tenant's comings and goings has largely disappeared...

...What characterizes American law enforcement is not the citizen who's harassed and punished for "being different" or holding an unpopular political view...

...There are some aspects of a person's life that the government has no business knowing anything about, and other areas where such knowledge should be collected only under special circumstances (see sidebar, page 27...

...In many cities the government's ability to process parking tickets is so poor that people feel unfairly persecuted when their car finally gets towed...

...This is a lesson learned in the early 1960s when, over the objections of some worried about the privacy implications, the IRS computerized its record-keeping system that monitors the interest payments made by banks to depositors...

...But there's an important distinction that privacy advocates usually overlook when they argue, in effect, that an inefficient government is necessary for the preservation of basic freedoms...

...The IRS is also the only government agency that keeps annual tabs on Americans' addresses on any largescale, systematic basis...

...Indeed, the development of a truly fair welfare system that distributes money on the basis of need depends on ensuring the accuracy of information given by recipients...

...Upon being apprehended, the robber had refused to consent to a search, whereupon the FBI agent phoned a federal magistrate and obtained a search warrant...

...The assumption underlying the exclusionary rule is that the citizen's right to privacy is so important that it's better to let obviously guilty people go free than to tacitly encourage illegal searches...

...The PLS tracks down fathers who are delinquent in child support payments to mothers drawing public assistance...

...Yet however much this might vex the officer, it hardly qualifies as punishment...

...But readers who dwell too much on the idea that "Big Brother is watching...

...Though hired by the corporation, these auditing firms are acting on the public's behalf...

...It is a view in which privacy is considered an inviolate right, much like freedom of speech or religion, and worthy of the same, absolute standard of protection...

...what is permissible one day can easily be used the next to put someone in jail, to render him a nonperson...

...Two years later he was returned to the custody of Janice Kelley, despite the fact that she suffered brain damage from chronic use of PCP...

...The FBI claims that release of the names would serve no purpose and would "violate the employees' right to privacy...

...in public, Winston constantly monitors even his facial expressions, lest he commit facecrime...

...And, quite predictably, Phillip Keisling is a contributing editor of The Washington Monthly...

...Those who stray from the mainstream, particularly on matters of sexual behavior and politics, can be ruined by malicious gossip...

...Partly, the blame lies with our chronically understaffed and underfunded social service agencies...

...Court of Appeals ruled it unconstitutional...

...Unfortunately, this insistence on the sanctity of tax return information also means that American taxpayers are being milked to the tune of billions of dollars a year...

...Dewitt was taken away from his mother and placed in foster care...

...Even when it comes to far more serious crimes, the IRS often isn't much help...

...one pays taxes to the entire government, which then divvies up the process among thousands of different programs...

...Who can doubt the sea change that has occurred in the space of just one generation...

...A key provision of the bill calls for sanctions against employers who knowingly hire those who reside illegally in the country...

...At home, Winston blanches at keeping a diary, writing with an old-fashioned fountain pen, owning a glass paperweight...

...But another obstacle is our exaggerated respect for family privacy...

...Those concerned with the integrity of these programs should recognize that an exaggerated concern for privacy ultimately undermines the ability to help those who need the government's help...

...And it shows in one of the common pathologies of life in the big city, where the loudly proclaimed preference for being "left alone" often masks deep-seated feelings of loneliness...

...Aryeh Neier, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, has long advocated the expungement of all conviction records, arguing that once a fine has been paid or a prison term served, retention of the information is merely "punitive...

...And in some respects, clinging to this discredited notion actually encourages cheating...

...The ACLU, for example, has long fought efforts by the government to condition the award of benefits on a waiver of the confidentiality of income tax records, arguing that such treatment would discriminate against those who must depend on government assistance...

...Applying the same approach in American courts would punish the guilty in both instances: both the criminal who's been caught and the officer who violated constitutional rights in apprehending him...

...The exclusionary rule is simply the remedy that a divided Supreme Court chose to use to discourage unlawful searches...

...The danger, Shattuck said, was that these purposes seem so benign that the government couldn't help but broaden the use of the card, and that this in turn would lead to a "fullblown dossier system, " which, by assembling all the government's information about citizens in one place, could enable it to "trace, monitor, and control each individual ." A centralized "dossier" system that could be instantly accessible to anyone with the right computer access code is a disquieting thought...

...The details of an adolescent homosexual experience have no business in a government computer file, but if one has been convicted of murder, or has made loose threats about killing the president, the government should know that...

...countless reputations and lives were ruined by innuendo, halftruths, and accusations based on "secret dossiers" and "intelligence reports" that were often gathered illegally and rife with inaccuracies...

...But a closer look at the worker identification proposal reveals that the concerns for privacy miss the point...

...the retribution of the community for unapproved liaisons...

...She found her escape in marrying Jimmy Carter, and when he decided to return after his Navy career, "I argued...

...Orwell had witnessed the success and the ghastly results that Hitler and Mussolini were able to achieve by preying upon nationalism...

...Besides, employers already have dozens of rationales, most of them more effective anyway, not to hire Hispanics`We need someone who can speak English, " "You're not qualified, " and "We're not hiring today, " being just three of them...

...In her recently published memoir, Rosalynn Carter tells of her ambivalence about Plains, where neighbors selflessly helped each other in time of crisis, such as when her father died young, but in which "There was no privacy...

...Privacy laws that regulate electronic surveillance are vague with regard to such things as cordless telephones and digital communications between computers...

...But in 1961, in Mapp vs...

...And Hoover could wreak more havoc than the stereotypical small-town busybody...

...This is not to endorse the electronic surveillance of what transpires in the bedroom...

...the evidence obtained—a gun and the loot—was inadmissible...

...It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time...

...There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment...

...Having the police peer through keyholes is repugnant to us...

...And it is a version that's even more prevalent in the modern American tradition—witness the high opinion generally exhibited by (largely urban) literary critics for these latter works, while those such as Our Town are commonly dismissed as being sentimental and shallow...

...The spectre of a national identification system has been most lately raised in connection with the Simpson-Mazzoli bill currently before Congress...

...Those who think privacy is steadily vanishing, as if it were some depletable natural resource like oil, should briefly consider two areas of their lives where most people have some reason for keeping secrets: their relationship with the law and their sexual behavior...

...IRS information similarly is unavailable to verify claims made by those who apply for means-tested government benefit programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children, food stamps, veterans pensions, Medicaid, and Social Security Disability...

...A wide range of sexual behavior has become accepted or at least acquiesced in...

...Christianity and international socialism are as weak as a straw in comparison to it...

...A 1979 Harris poll found that one-third of those surveyed already believed America was "close to the 1984 syndrome...

...This "mind your own business" ethic has even been codified into law...

...it can also undermine the public's trust in the law by giving criminals free rein to afflict citizens and defraud the government...

...a known criminal is now back in its midst who may well commit further crimes...

...For example, when the IRS was asked several years ago by a federal drug task force in Los Angeles to investigate a suspect's financial records, it took eight months to get cooperation...

...Peepholes in men's rooms are there to catch homosexuals . . . .The dossiers on all citizens mount in number and increase in size...

...law enforcement personnel have no access, though they supply much of the information...

...But there's another, darker version of the small town...

...the key piece of evidence at the trial was a taperecorded exchange during which an agitated Insurato shouted, "We got a deal, yes or no...

...Ohio, the U.S...

...Care if anybody lives or dies...

...During the 1960s the CIA and the military engaged in widespread, and illegal, spying on civil rights and antiwar demonstrators...

...Warren, an aristocrat married to the daughter of a Massachusetts senator, initiated the article after becoming vexed with newspaper coverage of his lavish social affairs...

...contact with the average citizen is limited largely to responding to an occasional call for help or apprehending him for a minor traffic violation...

...But America has obviously not become one giant Winesburg...

...The virtues of the parents are sufficiently known to reflect well on the children, and those who've made a mistake or two can be forgiven—and false rumors dismissed—if one's good character is widely acknowledged...

...Presently, punishing the police officers who violate privacy usually requires lengthy civil proceedings...

...In fact, much evidence suggests that Americans desire not more privacy, but less...

...There's a more direct solution to the problem of selective inquiries: simply prohibit law enforcement officials from asking to see the card...

...New Hampshire are somewhat more grisly...

...Representative Edward Roybal has characterized the proposal as a first step to "dog tags" and a system similar to one that "Hitler used ." Richard Fajardo, a staff attorney for the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund, says the card would be so convenient that law enforcement officers would not only use it to identify aliens, but would inevitably be selective in whom they queried...

...by gun-toting narcotics agents with the wrong address has no redress at all under the exclusionary rule...

...Tax information is sometimes available in such circumstances, but under restrictions passed by Congress in 1976 in response to tax abuses by Richard Nixon getting IRS cooperation can be an exhausting, bureaucratic battle...

...Facts that are irrelevant to one's character—say, an illegitimate birth, an unfortunate marriage— have an inordinate effect on one's life, and false rumors often have devastating consequences...

...Not at all: in these countries, judges also punish officers, on the spot, for their transgressions in gathering evidence...

...I like my privacy as well as the next one,' Black declared...

...Anything that could conceivably endanger privacy is viewed with alarm...

...Escaping the small town—and one's past—is a time-honored theme in American letters, not to mention the lives of many prominent Americans...

...instead, they must try to verify claims through other, more cumbersome (and often more intrusive) means—inquiries of neighbors, on-site inspections, and, in some states, examination of bank records...

...And it is revealed in the vicarious pleasures taken in the cult of celebrities, an impulse probably more prevalent in New York City than anywhere else in America...

...Yet the government now can't use tax information to locate the scofflaws who are trying to duck their repayment obligations...

...The American Civil Liberties Union has also leapt into this debate, arguing that the worker identification system is the first step down a very slippery—and treacherous—slope...

...I even screamed at him...

...For cities of 50,000 and more, for example, there were 3.3 police officers in 1948 for every violent crime reported...

...Hispanic groups and many of their advocates oppose employer sanctions altogether, so it is not surprising that they have also attacked the identification system that would make those sanctions possible...

...That means more computers, not to mention more government employees whose jobs are to look closely at people's tax returns...

...That's right—these were examples Shattuck gave in testifying against the worker identification system...

...Speak to each other...

...Orwell explains: "Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments, and vaporizations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future...

...The specifics of Coolidge vs...

...The strictures on sexual behavior have changed even more dramatically...

...What we got was worthless garbage, " says an auditor for Agriculture's inspector general...

...Now, they are being put on computers so that by pressing one button all the miserable, the sick, the suspect, the unpopular, the offbeat people of the nation can be instantly identified ." Hentoff adds, "Every one of Douglas's proofs that we are entering the age of no privacy has grown more unmistakable, in part because the technology has become more sophisticated and miniaturized, and in part because as time goes on, it is harder for more and more Americans to remember when they had a full-scale expectation of privacy...

...The Department of Agriculture never found out...

...In Oregon, male prison inmates have sued the state alleging that "pat down" searches by female prison guards violate their privacy rights...

...Soon after that, the state's attorney general issued a warrant for Coolidge's arrest and the search of his car, from which vacuum sweepings were taken that matched the victim's clothing and proved to be the key evidence in the case...

...As for the billions in delinquent loans—money owed to us, remember—the IRS could do more than deduct delinquent payments from tax refunds...

...for most people, the key question about 1984 isn't so much If, as How soon...

...The less the government knew about the lives of its citizens, the better off everyone would be...

...Far more significant—and terrible—is the state's randomness in deciding what it will and will not allow...

...The more benign vision of the small town is as old as John Winthrop's "City on a Hill"—a community where individuals with common values band together to live in open view, not just of each other but of the rest of the world...

...There is no question that discrimination against Hispanics is a serious problem...

...The Ghost of J. Edgar Not all the concerns of privacy advocates have been codified into the statute books—thankfully...

...Yet what's striking about the exclusionary rule is how it generally fails in this deterrent purpose, while doing nothing to protect or compensate the innocent...

...How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork...

...The second striking aspect of the contemporary concern with privacy is how often the effort to protect it goes to absurd and self-defeating extremes...

...Kay L. Gunderson Sometimes, the Cops Need to Know Dewitt Kelley's short life must have been filled with terror...

...Most states don't allow the latter, though one state that does—Massachusetts—has some of the strongest privacy statutes in the country...

...Meanwhile, the suspect had time to spirit $6.5 million out of the country to Mexican banks...

...This view, however, not only ignores the complexity of the issue but overlooks privacy's rather ambiguous status, both in law and in our culture...

...One doesn't pay taxes to the IRS...

...If anything, those who insist on it are viewed as somewhat unfriendly and antisocial...

...American citizens owe their fellow taxpayers nearly $40 billion in delinquent government loans...

...the officer can be fined and, in some cases, sentenced to jail...

...To put it another way, the best way to promote greater compliance with the tax laws isn't more privacy—it's less...

...So it is in Winesburg, Ohio with the story of Wing Biddlebaum, a popular school teacher whose affection for his young students was often exhibited by his hugs and hair-tousling...

...one didn't voluntarily reveal one's small-town origins—unless, of course, it somehow was fashionable to do so...

...for example, a case is still pending against the police department of New Haven, Connecticut, which from 1964 to 1971 wiretapped without legal warrants the phones of 3,000 residents...

...These yearnings are reflected in the countless pages of personal advertisements by people seeking companionship and romance, not to mention the armies of young professionals who pay analysts $75 an hour to discuss their feelings of isolation...

...such accuracy is necessary lest the more prosperous citizens who are financing these programs grow disillusioned and withdraw their support...

...Winesburg The role of privacy in the larger arena of American life and culture has been eauallv ambiguous, and nothing better illustrates this than the two very different characterizations of the small town in our literature, movies, and history...

...This small town is characterized by smallmindedness and vicious prejudices...

...During the 1950s there was McCarthyism...

...Supreme Court, U.S...

...Hispanics would be, " he claims...

...As for discrimination, the law requires all employees to present their cards for verification, whether it's the Hispanic agricultural worker or the new law associate at Cravath, Swaine, and Moore...

...Hoover's activities included wiretapping Martin Luther King's bedroom, identifying congressmen and other key officials who were alcoholics or homosexuals (for political blackmail purposes), and the infamous COINTELPRO campaign...

...There are exceptions...

...Put another way, if the thriceconvicted embezzler wants a job in the Treasury Department's Bureau of Printing and Engraving, the government would know his criminal history only if he chose to tell it...

...Unshackling the IRS A second area where privacy advocates go astray involves the confidentiality of income tax records...

...I knew it would be gone if we went back to live in the same community with my mother and Jimmy's mother...

...a pervasive sense of moral relativism, in which virtually all behavior is acceptable, eventually this destroys the basic values underlying a healthy nation...

...Still, it's important to understand the need to make distinctions about the kind of information that should be collected by the government and under what circumstances it can be used...

...But because of longstanding privacy concerns, the file can be used only by state licensing officials...

...Privacy advocates have also expressed concern about "pay cable television" since the billing process would enable outsiders to know what you're watching—as if this is somehow more threatening than the fact that one's tastes are now similarly known by the subscription departments of Hustler or the newsletter of the Socialist Workers Party...

...Writing in the November 1976 issue of the ACLU's Privacy Journal, Trudy Hayden attacked "the national enthusiasm for child abuse reporting," because it could be used to "track, label and stigmatize a child as a risk" Dewitt Kelley probably would have welcomed that kind of stigma...

...the legal worker need only show his card...

...Three examples of such short-sightedness are worth exploring at some length, for they graphically illustrate how the concern for privacy can go astray, and what the costs maybe...

...If, for example, out of the hundreds of domestic disturbance calls the police receive in one evening one were known to involve a family with a history of child abuse, the case could be given priority...

...Canada for example, is typical in allowing a judge to suppress evidence that has been obtained by what he believes was a fundamental violation of the defendant's rights...

...As for the law enforcement officer who finds heroin or even a murder weapon in an illegal search, the exclusionary rule supposedly "punishes" by forcing him to watch a guilty defendant return to the street...

...Arthur Young Co., the accounting industry is alleging that a heretofore unrecognized "accountant's privilege" should protect the privacy of certain information that corporations give them when audits are performed...

...What Orwell Really Feared George Orwell's 1984 is often read these days as a parable about privacy...

...in 1978, there were just 0.5...

...Civil libertarians have long argued that to allow other government agencies to have access to Internal Revenue Service files for such purposes as detecting fraud in benefit programs would violate the privacy of taxpayers...

...It's also a remedy unique in the Western world...

...Justice William 0. Douglas asserted that the right was enveloped in the "penumbra" cast by other constitutional rights...

...Far and away the most efficient means of collecting this money would simply be for the IRS to deduct payments from income tax refunds, which 80 percent of all taxpayers receive...

...How many of these were fraudulent applicants, and how many computer errors...

...Dewitt is just one of the several million children who suffered from physical abuse, neglect, or sexual molestation last year...

...By the time help arrives, it may be too late...

...In another drug smuggling case, a former Justice Department official recalls the time that the government had tax records in its possession that proved a defendant was lying about his "low income" in asking for a bail reduction...

...Infrared telescreens, for example, could now spy on Winston Smith in the dark...

...The Reagan administration has further endeared itself to would-be tax cheaters by cutting the IRS's enforcement budget...

...The IRS also opposes disclosure of tax information, though hardly out of a burning passion for civil liberties...

...the percentage of unresolved murders has tripled in the last 20 years...

...If you write a nasty letter to the president, the government should not retaliate by inspecting your tax return, but it should have that prerogative if you've declared bankruptcy to escape repayment of $30,000 in government-subsidized student loans...

...Perhaps most important, punishment could be meted out in those cases involving innocent citizens who possess no incriminating evidence—exactly the cases that cry out most for redress...

...In practice, the exclusionary rule has many perverse results...

...Those who make mistakes early in life often have no chance for redemption...

...Of course, the larger question about confidentiality of tax information is why it should be so cherished to begin with...

...And in their frequent criticisms of more efficient information-gathering techniques, groups such as the ACLU, whose headquarters is in New York City, reflected this view of America-as-Winesburg...

...True, thousands of government computer banks store data on everything from our criminal histories to our student loan portfolios...

...For more on 1984, see sidebar, page 17...

...Today's police patrol in climatecontrolled squad cars...

...Unfortunately, this appreciation of the complexity of the privacy issue—an appreciation of the best aspects of small-town life, as it were— often is not recognized by those who style themselves as the guardians of privacy...

...Orwell's point here is not that all invasions of privacy inevitably lead a country to totalitarianism, but that totalitarian states will invade privacy in random ways to keep their subjects under control . The leaders of Oceania have come to power not by way of piecemeal erosions of privacy but by manufacturing a continual state of war, which has enlarged the nationalist feelings of the populace to grotesque proportions...

...But because of privacy restrictions, the evidence couldn't be revealed at that stage of the legal proceedings...

...Dewitt died several days later in the intensive care unit of a Los Angeles hospital...

...The photographs of parents back at the farm were kept out of sight...

...Witness the tape-recordings of Charles Wick and the Reagan administration's plan to administer polygraph tests to detect those leaking government documents...

...The police today are far less noticeable than they were a generation ago, when officers patrolled neighborhoods on foot and made a point of staying abreast of such matters as the arrival of a stranger or the domestic difficulties of the couple who lived in the corner apartment...

...Seldom is the officer disciplined for his actions...

...Viewed in this light, the Reagan administration's move to keep the press out of Grenada so they could tell the story their way— as Orwell would put it, so they could "forget facts that have become inconvenient"--looks more like a step towards 1984 than the prospect of having a dog sniff your luggage for drugs at the airport...

...In this small town, the knowledge that one's character is a matter of public interest encourages good behavior, whether it's contributing to charity or simply being friendly to the store clerk who knows your family...

...Far from being a police state, America has fewer cops per capita today than 30 years ago—even though the incidence of crime has soared...

...But none of you do...

...Mistaken Identities The third area of concern surrounds proposals that might eventually lead to a "national identification system ." Such a system has long been a major bugaboo of civil libertarians...

...during the mid-1960s, for example, the federal government beat a hasty retreat after the ACLU and other privacy advocates attacked a plan to centralize its computer files...

...having neighbors who keep track of the comings and goings of people often has the salutary effect of reducing the need for police in the first place...

...A Florida state appeals court recently freed Anthony Insurato, who'd been convicted of murdering Irwin Trimbull...

...Some of the concerns of groups like the ACLU certainly are legitimate, particularly where the law fails to keep up with advances in technology...

...if anything, his colleagues rally around him and direct their wrath against the judge who let an obviously guilty, often dangerous criminal go free...

...if information could be used wrongly, many are inclined to not collect it at all...

...There, they were free to experiment with everything from politics to sex...

...The file lists those whose licenses have been revoked or suspended for such offenses as driving under the influence of intoxicants...

...Basically, civil libertarians imply that a major difference between a democracy and a police state is whether information can be retrieved at the touch of one button, or whether it takes two days to assemble by rummaging through several dozen different files...

...If any single American lends credence to the civil libertarians' worst fears about privacy, it is the late J. Edgar Hoover...

...Drunken drivers kill more than 20,000 Americans a year, which is a major reason the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration maintains a national file of "problem drivers" called the National Drivers Register...

...The first is how fundamentally wrong Orwell's terrible vision has proved to be...

...In this atmosphere, privacy is jealously protected for reasons of survival but still is often impossible...

...you" are missing Orwell's most important point...

...To prevent such sanctions from causing employers to simply avoid foreign-looking workers, the bill provides for the development of a centralized identification system that would allow employers to verify a worker's citizenship in a manner similar to a store clerk calling a central clearinghouse to check the validity of a VISA card...

...This tenet, known as the exclusionary rule, initially applied only to federal courts...

...he believed that as a unifying force there was nothing in the modern world that could compare: "As a positive force there is nothing to set beside it...

...As director of the FBI, Hoover showed few qualms about trampling on the privacy of citizens in his effort to ingratiate himself to a string of American presidents and ensure his bureaucratic survival...